A social networking site for quants might sound like an oxymoron, but executives at Quantitative Services Group LLC beg to differ. Staff at the equity analytics provider built Quant-Link.com as the first online lifestyle site for the quantitative finance community.
QSG created http://www.quant-link.com with an eye toward becoming the MySpace or Facebook of the quant world, albeit with a more grown-up vibe and more serious content, said Catherine Morgenstern, spokeswoman for the Naperville, Ill.-based firm. The website went live on May 20.
“This is a pet project for our firm. We built the site for the quantitative industry because we could. We provide our services to clients via a web interface and we have the programmers, the internal capability to maintain a site like this,” Ms. Morgenstern said.
Quant-Link.com provides a forum for quantitative finance types, from students and their professors to money managers and practitioners, Ms. Morgenstern said. The site quite likely will never feature a clip about the making of some new music video, the forte of social sites like MySpace.com, but it will allow members to create personal profiles, run a blog, tap quant research resources, chat with each other and peruse job postings.
Casting off the stereotypical image of quants as geeks and loners who would rather play with numbers, more than 250 users had already registered on Quant-Link.com as of press time. — Christine Williamson
